Ganneff's Little Blog

Thoughts of a small and very unimportant Debian Developer

Another major release of Debian where I had the pleasure to do the ftpmaster work for the release. Like the last times, Mark joined to help with the work. But 2 FTPMasters aren’t enough for one Wheezy, or so, so Ansgar had his first run aside from point releases.

With the whole load of work the release team did in the past to prepare this, combined with all the changes in dak we had since Squeeze, it turned out to be rather easy for us.

Again, a few moments and not a detailed log (times in CEST):

[10:45] Let’s prepare. Cronjobs go off on ftp-master and security, shared tmux session setup, including a live pipe into a file so other team members can follow using “less +F -R”, a titanpad page opened to share in writing the commands to process later.

[11:18] One last package update done manually. The latest and greatest of installation-guide, 20130503, really wants to join the rest in wheezy.

[12:00] While I did a database backup and started preparing the set of commands for later, Mark and Ansgar prepared our code to deal with the changes we are about to make.

[12:33] I start executing the commands (shell and sql), so somewhen after here we have Squeeze as oldstable (with all its extra suites also renamed), Wheezy as stable (taking its own suites with it, as well as gaining the -updates).

And Jessie starts its life.

[12:45] Heissa, wouldn’t be fun if we wouldn’t have some bugs, so we just created a load of directories not needed or wanted. Not getting Jessies either. Ohwell.

[13:00] Jessie gets a copy of Wheezy to start with. Made the mistake to try that with our usual tool, control-suite. Err. Wrong. This is doing a set of checks on each package inserted. Would take ages. While one SQL to bypass the checks was a minute or so.

[13:xx] Got annoyed by our concept of consistency. Its great. Every tool takes suite names/codenames in a different way. Seperated with spaces, with commas, with codenames, with suitenames, we mix it in all possible combinations.

[14:00] Ansgar finished updating our security master host to cope with the changes for the release.

[14:39] Squeeze Release files got regenerated and signed again.

[14:54] Wheezy Release files got generated and signed.

[15:05] The cd build machine has a synced mirror tree, so they can start building our CD/DVD images

[16:25] A manual dinstall finished. And while it had some small problems (including nearly overwriting something inside the wheezy dists/ tree), it went pretty smoothly.

[21:00] After having kept the archive turned off for the whole day, we have 90 uploads with ~3Gb of uploads waiting. As it is now unlikely that we need larger archive changes, we turn (most of) our cronjobs back on, to get them processed.

Right now (that is, 21:08 CEST) I am mostly waiting for the CD build to finish. Current schedule seems to have that in some two and a half hours, after which we can push the mirrors and our press people announce it. Except if Murphy wants to show up, but lets hope that not.

Thanks go out to everyone involved in preparing this release, be it in the past by fixing bugs, uploading packages, doing whatever was needed, as well as doing the work today.